


Winter Dark

by Runespoor



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Gotham eats her children, No Man's Land, man is a wolf to man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 09:06:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2542013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runespoor/pseuds/Runespoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the winter of No Man’s Land, the Huntress is more of a watchdog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter Dark

It’s deep in the midst of winter and No Man’s Land that Helena gives up. 

The city is covered in a white, pillowy blanket of snow. It softens the angles of the city, gives broken buildings the dignity of Germanic ruins, restful, untouched. The city is quiet, still. There’s no sound pollution in No Man’s Land, and ice on the last towers reaching into the sky glitters like a fairytale castle. The air is frosty, and cold, and clean. 

Whatever the hour, the city seems mostly empty. The cold chases people inside, tracking after them with its piercing spear, forcing them to huddle together in caved-in houses. 

In No Man’s Land forces that man thought he’d domesticated have taken back their rights; cold and darkness have spread back, claiming their silent victory over their spoils of war, and the people have shied back to instincts. It was always survival of the fittest, the most gruesome savagery in a thin veneer of civilization; now they’ve been stripped of the lies that let them sleep at night. 

Gotham’s truth is bared, and it’s pitiless and hungry. Helena has known her for long. 

The snow sparkles, comfy-looking, and Helena finds it as indecent, cloaking the twisted, rusted metal bones of the city, as a fur coat thrown over the skeleton shoulders of a beggar.

She’s reminded of tales she read as a child, the Old Continent frozen in winter. The books told of woods so deep and so dark light could never touch them, and small villages besieged by winter. Wolves on the prowl merely beyond the edge of the farthest house. The bell of the church would count the hours, keeping evil at bay; taming time, making it into something that could be measured. 

It made the eternal nights of winter into instruments of reason, how their length fluctuated over the season. When people noticed the night shortening visibly, they would keep hope.

Helena wishes there were more churches in Gotham, and more bells. The Clocktower, despite its name, doesn’t ring. The silhouette of the building, one of too few still standing, by turns reassures Helena and enrages her. It’s taunting her, promises of security it can never deliver; it’s proof that some things are still standing. It has not, after all, fallen.

The Clocktower marks civilization, and Helena often patrols, for all the good it does, with it in her back. She isn’t certain if she’s _turning her back on it_ or if she trusts it to _have her back_. But it is here, it is familiar, and it is not one of the things she is interested in fighting. 

She figures it makes them as much allies as anything else.

She’s far out where the Clocktower’s shadow doesn’t reach when she finds the scene. 

It’s something out of a storybook, from centuries past in Europe. It doesn’t belong in Gotham; not in a place where predator is a word that refers to sexual abuse. 

At another time, she would have called it a body. There’s far too little left of it to be called anything but remains. In another time, what she stumbles upon would be a murder scene.

She tries the words out, rolling them around in her head. For all that the Huntress is a hardened crime-fighter, she doesn’t dare mouth the words. The contents of her stomach, all acid, are climbing up her throat. She can almost taste it, on the back on her tongue.

Around the corpse, snow has melted into pinkish, queasy-looking mud. It used to be a human being, but now it is only a torn-apart mass of organs. If a good man or woman stumbled upon it, and tried to give it a decent burial – someone like Gordon, who insists on as many of the social niceties as can be arranged, customs to preserve the city’s sanity (Helena could tell him, it’s far too late for that, if it was ever more than a pipe dream) – they wouldn’t be able to. There are too many parts missing.

Once upon a time, she’d have called it a massacre. Today…

There’s a single line of dragged-down steps leading to and from the naked remains, buried in the snow like it’s been walked several times, by several different beings. And the traces of the running steps of the victim, disordered and panicked.

Lots of parts missing. Cut and stripped down like a animal, very clean. Precisely like an animal. Lots of meat, missing.

_Wolves_ , Helena thinks. The horror of being shut in with the wolves all around grips her, like the villagers in her storybooks, freezing her to her core. 

The wolves are wearing human skins, in Gotham. It’s nothing new, but “man is a wolf to man” only used to be a phrase. And "the strong eat the weak" a metaphor.

In that moment, she knows: should they survive No Man’s Land, she doesn’t think they will truly live through it.


End file.
